Bhutan declares its entire street dog population fully sterilized and vaccinated

Congratulations! Rabies is such a scary disease but these vaccination campaigns do work. Germany, Estonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria and the Czech Republic became officially rabies free in 2003 after many years of vaccinating wild foxes and all the red rabies warning signs of my childhood are finally gone.

Quite the achievement. Many years ago on a Thai beach there were a few stray dogs and the locals said one was called "Balls" because he was the only one that they couldn't sterilize. Every time the vet arrived Balls would smell him a mile away and just bolt, disappearing for a few hours.

That was an amazing achievement, treating something like 10,000 dogs a year for 15 years! Now that the initiative has ended I hope that some form it continues since maintaining a sterilized and vaccinated population will be a lot easier and less expensive than waiting until things get out of hand again. Outsiders wandering in and escaped pets turned strays have the potential to undo much of their great work.

Older cartoons of the west often feature (primarily as a villain) the "dog catcher".

I hate this so much. Humans are a disease when considering only things like this.<p>What authority does any human have to neuter animals at random? Why? Because they will suffer? The kick them out to the wild if you don&#x27;t want to see their suffering, let them adapt to there.<p>Few things disgust me more than cruelty disguised as kindness. You can own an animal, you can kill one but only for food or clothing and other survival needs but no one has the right mutilate animals and leave them to linger on.<p>The problem is humans now have weapons, pesticide and tech to fight off things animals would have helped is with and this is our response. You don&#x27;t need sterlisarion and kill shelters, animals either starve to death or adapt and move out to areas where they can find food&#x2F;prey. If you are worried about the ecosystem in a city, donate to a zoo so you can look at whatever animals you want, humans and their pets decimating a city&#x27;s ecosystem is a natural outcome of the human-animal ecosystem! Our insistence in regulating ecosystems is what is unnatural. Leave the animals be, get comfortable with strays in your city like some cities already are (istanbul and i hear rome too).

It is extremely cruel to neuter an adult male dog and release it. They will have fatigue, lethargy, and weakness that will slowly kill them. They lose all “fight,” energy, and will to live. It is nothing like neutering a dog before it matures.<p>A family member had my dog neutered without my permission while watching him him for me, and his rapid decline and death were heartbreaking…. Euthanasia is much less cruel.

This is quite an achievement, especially considering the magnitude of the street dog population in all neighboring countries (India, Nepal, Tibet).

&gt; There are approximately 300 million street dogs across Asia<p>Didn’t expect that number honestly.

The post title feels grammatically off in a way I&#x27;m struggling to articulate. I think it&#x27;s the difference between &quot;declares &lt;object&gt; &lt;adjective&gt;&quot; and &quot;declares that &lt;clause&gt;&quot;.<p>Examples of the former:<p><pre><code> - Researchers declare food unhealthy. - Invaders declare territory theirs. </code></pre> I think my problem is that the former is used in contexts that are either subjective or abstract, whereas the latter is just and indication that somebody has said something.<p>When you declare &lt;thing&gt; &lt;attribute&gt;, you are making an assertion with some implicit authority. When you declare that &lt;event has happened&gt;, you are simply making an announcement.

Tblisi Georgia does this as well. The dogs are ear tagged and are sort of like the community pets.

Wow - great on them! At first I was saddened at the idea of sterilizing that many animals but on further reading the article estimates there are 300 million street dogs across Asia... That&#x27;s a hard number to swallow.

Why do you even need to have a street dog population?

so in ~5 years time, no street dogs in Bhutan???

I wish Turkey would do this too. Street dogs gather in packs and periodically attack people: not just small children, they go after grown men and women who are just walking down the street during daylight hours. This is true in major cities, like Ankara.<p>When I’m there I avoid walking around after sunset or in areas without people, primarily because I don’t want to be stuck in the open with 3 or 4 hungry street dogs hunting me.

100% is a big achievement in street dog unavailability - much harder than, say, 99.999%. In k-nines (un)availability, the cost usually increases by 10 * k to increment k by 1.<p>It&#x27;s tempting to imagine that they didn&#x27;t actually get to 100%, and there are some hidden holdouts who have escaped the program and will re-establish the street dog population covertly.

next up the street rats

It’s going to be just us and the pod in the not so distant feature, no need for other forms of being in the world to be around us.<p>And then people will keep posting about their depression medication and about increasing suicide rates.